Unescapable Cage

Murder in the Cassava Patch,a crime novelette written by Bai T.Moore is the most renowned and the only Liberian Literature classic.It unsettlement style,and language connecting both Americo-Liberians and indigenous make it popular among Liberians’ and since published in 1968,it had been added to high school curriculum as a required reader for every high school student in Liberia.Told in the first person narrative,the novel ironically revealed incest conjugality,slavery,and invasion of Liberia’s traditional marriage culture by the repatriated free black slaves(settlers’)from the Americas.Wrapped up in a rich tapestry of local culture,the author dramatically based the novel on unrelenting love,desire,betrayal,and vengeance.Based on ethical theory of marriage,this paper focused on the identity crisis in the Vai’s cross-border marriage,family hegemony and social economics ineptness,and the desperate pursuit of felicity in the midst of matrimonial trauma.Ethically analyzing conflicts and crisis between traditional marriage and contemporary marriage civilization introduced by the free black slave from America that got the main characters of Murder in the Cassava Patch Gortokai,Tene and Kema lost in their own culture.It further explored colonial alienation,assimilation and acculturation of multiple marriage norms,family hegemony,marital discord,celibacy,and self-exploration as results of invasion of traditional marriage culture by the settlers infusion of marital “will and choice” in the Dewoin culture,and involuntary coerced indigenous to acculturate it as the main stream culture,which led the protagonist Gortokai to breached the Vai’s marriage norms by chosen Kema to intercede on his behalf in his dowry to Tene which is a taboos of the Vai’s traditional marriage culture(spinster cannot get involve with marry procedure).Nevertheless,despite confusions and debates on matrimonial ethical crisis within the novel culture and the world at large,marriage is the only unescapable institution for those who intend to build family.Through an ethical discourse,this thesis concluded that Murder in the Cassava Patch ironically reflect invasion of Liberia’s traditional marriage culture by the settlers’ who brought along with them a borrowed Americas marriage culture of will and choice;that which creates ethical crisis in contemporary Liberia’s marriage culture.95% of Liberians being indigenous,the borrowed Americas marriage culture continues to create pandemonium in marital ethic in Liberia.It is thereby posited that in order to reconcile Liberia’s marriage culture,harmonization of the both statutory and customary marriage laws of Liberia is relevant to contemporary marriage culture.